As I mentioned in the other thread I lost my job, so I can't afford to go to the dealer for oil changes anymore. The Mini approved-oil page listed on the airbox lid no longer works, and apparently BMW switched their recommendation for this car from 5W-30 to 0W-30 at some point after it was built. Would it be worth switching back to 5W-30, and in any case what brand and formula are best for these cars?

 

I ran 5w40 Euro Castrol in my 2012 R55 Clubman. You can go to Walmart and pick up a 5 quart jug for ~$25. I did oil changes every 5,000 miles, and filter changes every 10,000 miles.

 

Sounds like the same exact stuff I was using in my Veloster, but your 2012 would have been an N14 engine, correct? How similar is the N18 in that regard?

 

Nope, it had the N18 engine. Bought it with 34k miles, always did my own oil changes following the 5,000/10,000 schedule, and ran it up to just over 200k miles.

 

Sounds good

 

What about the filter? The only filter Autozone even carries in Alaska for this car is 2 different varieties of STP, and they don't even appear to carry the OEM filter. O'Reilly has WIX (listed with an OE number) and 2 different MicroGard filters (only the lesser of which is listed with an OE number). NAPA has 2 different grades of their own brand. Carquest's website is utterly useless.

 

I usually just run with whatever filter I can get. 10k miles is nothing for modern filter tech, especially if you’re changing the oil every 5k miles.

 

Man, is it ever a pain to replace the filter on these cars.

Weird thing happened while I was letting it run to get a "true" oil level reading. Because I'm lazy, I tried to pull the dipstick and check oil with the engine running. I've had other cars run fine with dipsticks I didn't even realize were loose (once after hitting a black bear, another time when a dipstick O-ring started to fail), so I had no reason to suspect it would do anything unusual. This time thought, the engine INSTANTLY starting making a squeal that didn't sound like it was coming from the dipstick tube, and idling very rough. No CEL or oil pressure warnings. Turned engine off, put dipstick back, started back up and it idled normally with no unusual noises. Because I'm an idiot, I pulled the dipstick while running two more times to see if the condition would reoccur and it didn't.

The possibility that really scares me is that the timing was just a coincidence, and some dirt got in the oil filter and clogged a critical passage somewhere, but as far as I know the outside of the oil filter is the dirty side anyway and if it was oil starvation, the noise + roughness should have started smoothly rather than all at once.

I'd been idling for several minutes the first time, so did I cause a vacuum leak that then made the car run poorly due to extra electrical load from the radiator fan, or some other weird causal chain like that?